The Pink Panther Cartoons

It wasn’t their lack of persuasion from United Artists that caused the absence of a selection of this Chaplinesque characters antics in the Derann sales catalogues, no this ‘Pink Pests’ name was constantly brought into every conversation we had with our contact at UA, (head of TV sales… as they didn’t have a 16mm/8mm sales division), and his Argentinian boss from the States (who we called Ralph). No both of them, Ralph in particular, really wanted us to take a mixture ten or more of their cartoon shorts, which included not only their most popular character but also ‘The Inspector’, ‘The Ant and the Aardvark’, ‘Roland and Rattfink’, and ‘The Texas Toads’ shorts, all from the DePatie–Freleng Enterprises studios. For a time there was even a feeling that by rejecting the cartoons we may lose the whole UA deal, but thankfully that never happened. Walton Films had a selection of Pink Panthers (just where they got the rights, still puzzles me), as did Marketing Film of Germany, Film Office in France and the Italian distributor Avo Film, in fact Avo Film’s stand at Photokina was always plastered with Pink Panther images. No the truth of it was Derek and myself were were not particularly big fans of this cartoon character. The range from Walton Films sold very poorly and we believed that this was because the UK Super 8 collectors felt the same as ourselves. Were we correct or did we make a big mistake?